Seven reasons I stick with WordPress

In 2006, after living in Amsterdam and contracting to various large organisations, I decided to start my own business, offering web development services. I slowly built up a number of small clients as well as consulting for corporates, such as Sensis and Australia Post. Early on, after trying out various content management systems (CMS), I realised that WordPress showed great potential as a user-friendly CMS, even though at the time it was a simple blogging platform.

So I started using WordPress for my smaller clients. In those days there were no smart phones or tablets, but there were browser-compatibility considerations. I had to hand code each template individually and I built up a library of code to use for things such as menus and sidebars. There were very few plugins and social media was very new so there was a lot of hacking and fiddling around with code.

Over the years, the people over at WordPress realised that more and more developers were using WordPress for content websites as well as blogs and they began to move WordPress in that direction. Now, more than ten years since I started Spiral Designs and WordPress is still my content management system of choice, but these days it’s far easier to set up and comes with a lot more built-in features (and no more hacking!)

So here are the reasons that I continue to use and recommend WordPress for content websites as well as blogs:

Easy to use: You don’t need a Computer Science degree to get in and add or change content

Easy to install: You can be up and running with a full-featured and attractive website in under an hour if you are not too picky and know what you’re doing, which makes paying a professional to do it for you a lot cheaper.

Hundreds of great, free templates to choose from: And most of them are responsive, meaning they are already coded to work in different devices such as smart phones and tablets

Huge array of useful plugins: If you want WordPress to do something that it doesn’t do out of the box, there’s a plugin for it. Backups, security, statistics, social media integration (watch out for future blog posts with some recommendations.)

Expand as you wish: You can start a community with WP-MU (WordPress Multi-User), add commerce, post videos and much more

All the security you need: Comment spam, Denial-of-service attacks, backups, login security – they’re all covered with the help of plugins.

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is easy: You get some level of SEO out of the box but you can easily expand this with plugins.

I’m mostly talking from my experience with self-installed WordPress instances from WordPress.org but you also get most of this with WordPress.com sites as well (these are hosted by WordPress). Watch out for a future post on the comparison between WordPress.org and WordPress.com.

If you are interested in getting your own WordPress website up and running quickly with a bit of help from Spiral Designs, head over to the contact page and get in touch.